Tag Archives: hedonism

The following is drawn from Pierre Hadot, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique ? (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 191-96. Some non-English secondary sources have been removed from Hadot’s footnotes. The title is editorial.

To achieve the healing of the soul and a life in accord with the fundamental [Epicurean] choice, it is not enough to have learned the Epicurean philosophical discourse. Read more …

The other day, as I was wandering through an IKEA store as family members were finishing up shopping, I saw a young white woman with a striking T-shirt. She wasn’t overtly pretty, nor was she ugly. She wasn’t skinny and she wasn’t fat. But during the five or six seconds we shared in the same section of the store, I could determine a few things about her. Read more …

A frequently discussed issue among Right-wing circles is the new generation and its relations with the previous one; “revolutionary” youth in relation to the men and ideas of the Fascist period. Some, in this regard, believe that the same phenomenon is met with here that can be observed more generally: the new generation no longer understands the generation that preceded it, the accelerated pace of events having interposed between the one and the other a mental distance much larger than that which in other times normally would have separated them. Read more …

Here’s a sign that the feces-slinging partisan playpen that is the Internet is getting to you: I caught myself feeling decidedly strange as I made plans to write this tandem review of an essay collection by Andy Nowicki—a devout Catholic—and Valencia, an autobiographical novel by James Nulick, whose protagonist catches AIDS during a gay-sex-and-crack binge.

“Who’s going to want to read about both of them?” said my stupid brain. Read more …

“Postmodernism” is one of those academically fashionable weasel words like “paradigm” that have now seeped into middlebrow and even lowbrow discourse. Those of us who have fundamental and principled critiques of modernity quickly learned that postmodernism is not nearly postmodern enough. Read more …

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is one of my favorite movies. I didn’t want to like it. I didn’t even want to see it. Everything I’d heard made me think it would be thoroughly nihilistic and quite unpleasant. But then someone at a party described Pulp Fiction as a movie about “greatness of soul at the end of history,” and that caught my attention, Read more …